


welcome to the second reel

by idrilka



Series: for all of the perfect things that i doubt [4]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Closeted Character, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Anxiety Disorder, Pre-Canon, mentions of overdose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5577097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idrilka/pseuds/idrilka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They win at home. It goes all the way to game six, and then they win in their own home arena after it goes to double overtime, and Kent gets to lift thirty-four pounds of silver into the air.</i>
</p><p>(In the aftermath of the Aces' first Stanley Cup Championship title, Kent goes to Samwell on his Cup day.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	welcome to the second reel

**Author's Note:**

> This story constitutes primarily a semi-direct follow-up to my Swawesome Santa Fic Exchange gift, _feet first; don't fall_ , and as such, it contains various references to that story, but it should still be easily understood by people who have not read it. It also constitutes the bridge between the Parse we see at the end of the previous installment and the Parse we see in the comic, and then later on in _maybe i'm waking up_.  
>  As usual, a few thank yous are in order: first of all, thank you to beardsley, lanyon and Alyssa for their constant cheerleading and awful, awful enabling. Secondly, thank you to the rest of the twit crew, who listened to me ramble about this story at length and just enabled me further. And, as always, huge, _huge_ thank you Codie, who remains the greatest beta and the greatest friend anyone could wish for. Thank you so much, darling!  
>  Title from [_The Boy With the Bubblegun_](http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+mcrae/the+boy+with+the+bubblegun_20138446.html) by Tom McRae, mostly because it _hurts_.

They win at home. 

It goes all the way to game six, and then they win in their own home arena after it goes to double overtime, and Kent gets to lift thirty-four pounds of silver into the air. 

There are no words to explain the tight feeling in his chest, the way he can’t seem to catch his breath as the Cup goes up, up, up over his head, and he doesn’t cry. No. He _grins_. 

It finally gets him in the showers, and he almost doubles over, sobbing with the palm of his hand pressed to his mouth, his other hand braced on the wet tile, holding him upright as he tries to process the fact that he is now a Stanley Cup champion. 

Kent remembers himself at six, right after his mom registered him on his first hockey team, watching the Wings win the Cup on their old tv at their apartment in Groesbeckville, thinking, _I want to do that one day_. It’s taken him the whole twenty years and eleven months of his life to get there, and now he’s the youngest captain in the history of the league to lead his team to the championship title. 

There’s still a little part of him that can’t fully grasp the enormity of what has just transpired.

“Dude, you okay?” 

There’s a hand on Kent’s shoulder, slippery from water, and when he turns around, Nate is standing behind him, watching Kent. Nate’s dripping water all over the tile, and his playoff beard looks criminally good on him. Kent just feels itchy and scratchy, and he can’t wait to get rid of the damn thing.

Kent clears his throat, nods. 

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice is hoarse, both from yelling and crying. “I just…it’s a lot. But I’m good, I’m good. _More_ than good, even. Stanley Cup champions, baby.”

He smiles. Wonders if Jack watched the game, if he saw the last goal Kent scored. The game-winner.

Nate presses his forehead to Kent’s and grins at him. “Hell yeah,” he says. “Fuck, Parser, we really did it.”

Kent wants to kiss him, but he just tightens his grip on the nape of Nate’s neck and laughs. “Fuck yeah, we did.”

.

They had a plan, before.

They had a plan for how they would play on different teams, and then one of them would ask to get traded, and then they would win the Cup—maybe not for the first time, but for the first time _together_ —and they would have their Cup days on their respective birthdays. How they would spend those two days together. How they would be happy. 

Instead, Kent went to the Aces while Jack went to rehab. 

It’s been three years since Kent last saw him face to face. Three years since he talked to him, beyond a single text from Jack to Kent, back when Kent won the Calder, and a string of unanswered messages from Kent to Jack over the years.

He still talks to Bob, from time to time, but for all the times Kent asked him to pass a message on to Jack, there has been nothing in return, and really, Kent should’ve probably gotten the message loud and clear a while ago, but the way it all ended continues to eat at him, like a festering wound that doesn’t want to close, a deep, open gash somewhere inside of Kent, like something was cut out of him and never stitched back together, the little part of himself he’d left on that hotel bathroom floor in Quebec. 

There have been a lot of things that happened since then. 

Kent survived his first year in the NHL and didn’t slowly go out of his mind, trying to get past the loneliness and hurt, and anger, and the shock of finding the first person he fell in love with in a pool of his own vomit in a shitty hotel bathroom. 

He got named captain, for the first time in the history of the franchise. He won the Calder. 

The Aces made playoffs three times.

Jack went to college.

(Kent heard about it first in the locker room on clean-out day.

“Dude, have you heard the news?” Orlovsky asked, sorting through his jockstraps. “Zimmermann is going to college.”

Kent’s head snapped up from where he was bent over his skates to look at Jax. 

“What?”

Orlovsky nodded. “Yeah, he got accepted into some fancy Ivy League school in New England or some shit.”)

It hurt, back then, and it still hurts Kent to think that Jack chose _college_ over hockey. That Jack would rather drop his old life like it was nothing instead of coming back to Kent. He could’ve signed with the Aces as a free agent, too old now to enter the draft—and Kent would’ve convinced the management, he would’ve convinced them it was the right choice, that they were better together than they were apart. Jack could’ve been there, on the ice, right next to Kent, winning the Cup. It would feel like the world has finally righted itself. Like it happened the way it was always supposed to be—the two of them, together. 

Instead, Kent has to do this on his own.

.

Bob calls him once they’re en route to the owner’s mansion for the after-party, travelling in style in a limo rented just for the occasion, all expenses paid for by the management. Kent has Nate on one side and Orlovsky on the other, Laakkonen, Dubois and Sasha sitting across from them on the leather seats, and Kent picks up, drunk on champagne and endorphins. 

Once the rest of the guys realize he has Bad Bob on the line, they make Kent switch to loudspeaker, and they scream their thanks for the congratulations back at Bob in that uncoordinated way which signals far too much booze this early in the night. 

“We’re really proud of you, son,” Bob says when Kent switches back from loudspeaker, and Kent slowly sinks into the seat, warm and satisfied. “And so is Jack, you know he is. But he couldn’t—”

Kent half-nods, half-shakes his head. “No, no I get it. Tell him thank you.”

When Kent puts his phone away, Nate knocks into him, smiling lazily at Kent, his eyes slightly unfocused. “You okay, dude?” he asks, and Kent smiles back, easy and practiced.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m always okay.”

.

The first thing he does once the celebration dies down a few days later, and he’s once again sober and more or less capable of doing something besides eating, sleeping and drinking his weight in alcohol, is sit down with management to renegotiate his contract. 

Negotiations are long and grueling, but Leah, Kent’s agent, is tough as nails, and the management is pretty generous, all things considered, because Kent just took the Aces to their first ever Cup win, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, and he’s pulling fucking _unbelievable_ stats, so they want to keep him in Vegas and they want to keep him _happy_. 

They mostly argue over the length of the contract—the Aces want eight years, Kent wants five, with a no-trade, no-move clause. In the end, it goes up to six years, sixty million dollars, with a hefty signing bonus. It’s not a bad deal, considering. It’s a hell of a lot better one than his initial three-year contract. 

The second thing he does is buy a condo downtown. It’s a penthouse that’s mostly glass and steel, and raw brick, and floor-length windows that open on the panorama of Las Vegas, all lights and frenzy, and glitz. 

This time, he hires a moving company to do all the heavy lifting for him, but he still invites Cal over once it’s done. It’s tradition. 

“Know what you’re gonna do with your Cup day, man?” Cal asks over deep-dish pizza that Kent detests but doesn’t begrudge Cal, who helped Kent move into his last two apartments—three, if you count this one and the one box of books Cal actually lifted and carried to the elevator.

Kent looks at Cal and takes an obnoxiously large bite of his meat lovers pizza, chews thoughtfully for a moment. 

“Yeah,” he says, and there’s no hesitation in his voice. “I do.”

.

It’s always a little strange to go back home for the off-season, because it doesn’t really _feel_ like home anymore, and it’s not like Kent has any meaningful childhood memories connected to this place—he left those at their old apartment in Groesbeckville, and they were few and far between, the space always marred by the shadow of their sorry excuse for an absentee father.

But that’s where his family is, and that’s enough. He doesn’t get to see them nearly often enough—and yeah, they came to Vegas for the finals, and they hugged Kent on the ice until he could barely breathe, crying, but they needed to get back to New York while Kent stayed behind to take care of his contract renewal, and he’d been too exhausted and aching to properly appreciate their presence. 

He almost gets mobbed by fans at the airport, not fooled by his pathetic attempts at anonymity which consist of a nondescript t-shirt and a floral snapback, and he spends half an hour signing autographs and taking pictures, answering questions that vary from _who’s your favorite player in the league right now_ to _will you marry me_.

He jokes with the fans, chirps them a little for getting up this early just to see him and makes small talk while he’s signing various jerseys, shirseys, and other assorted Aces merchandise, then bows out and leaves the airport, followed by the watchful eyes of airport security. 

Maybe he really should think about hiring a bodyguard, like the GMs have been suggesting, but he would feel ridiculous, for one thing, and for another, he would go fucking _nuts_ if he had someone following him at all times. There are some secrets he keeps for a reason.

The house is empty when he gets out of the cab, and he lets himself in with his key, usually stashed in his desk drawer for months at a time. 

Inside, there’s a note from his mother pinned to the fridge with a cat magnet that Kent bought for Sam as a joke gift a while ago. 

_At work. Be back later.  
Love, Mom  <3_

Kent has no idea where Sam is. 

He unpacks and makes himself a turkey sandwich, because he’s starving, his body still recovering from the playoffs push and the lethal pace of the last series. He has no idea when he falls asleep on the living room couch, between one breath and another, but when he wakes up, groggy and disoriented, it’s already afternoon, and his mother is leaning over him with a smile, then pulls him into a hug. 

“Welcome home, baby.”

.

He spends the first part of his Cup day in Albany. 

They rent out a venue and Kent throws a party, and he gets photographed drinking champagne out of the Cup, but it’s just for show, and once the cameras are gone to commit the rest of the party to memory and film, Kent stops drinking altogether. 

His mom and Sam are here, tanned and freckly after two weeks in Hawaii, and his mom is going through mimosas like it’s her job, smiling and relaxed for once. If there was even an occasion that warranted day-drinking, it’s this, and besides, Kent is still paying off a debt that’s impossible to repay, so the least he can do is keep his mom happy, if only for a while.

The truth is—Jack might have been Kent’s best friend and the first person Kent had fallen in love with, and even now, it seems sometimes like the shadow of Jack is in everything Kent does, everything Kent touches, but he will never love anyone in his life more than he loves his mother. His mother, who sacrificed a lot to get him to this place and never made him feel like he was a burden, even when he _knew_ he was.

The guy from the Hockey Hall of Fame they assigned for Kent’s Cup day is younger than Kent expected him to be—thirty, maybe thirty-five—and he hangs around in the distance, keeping an eye on things, but the party is pretty tame, especially by Cup day standards. No buoyancy tests and no bonfires. It’s open admission, so there are fans milling around, and Kent poses with some of them when they ask, signs some autographs, chats up a few pretty girls, hoping the pictures will make rounds and the fucking journos will stop asking if there’s _someone special_ in Kent’s life, like anyone gives a shit. He’s not in Vegas to find a goddamn trophy wife, he’s there to hit a puck with a stick and do it better than anyone else.

Sometimes he thinks he should just get it over with—any media scrum would do, really, and he could just drop the bomb and walk away, and keep walking until none of the fallout could catch up to him.

But the thing is—he might be on top of the fucking world right now, but he also knows how shitty this sport that he plays can be, and he knows how quickly the mighty may fall, so he keeps his mouth shut and smiles every time the journos try to very subtly ask if he’s fucked a girl recently, as if any of that mattered on the ice.

It’s almost lunchtime when he notices a group of small boys hovering some distance away from the Cup, looking up at the way it catches light and reflects it, almost blinding. They can’t be more than nine-ten, probably play hockey on the Squirts or something, because they look reverent and not just bored because their parents dragged them to a party when they wanted to stay home and play video games.

He makes his way towards them, watching as they scramble when they see him approach.

“Any of you touch the Cup yet?” Kent asks, and the three of them shake their heads, looking horrified. They _do_ play hockey, then. “Yeah, yeah, better stay away just in case, right? Hi, I’m Kent,” he introduces himself, even though he knows it’s probably redundant, because the three of them are wearing his jerseys. “So where do you play?”

In all honesty, he doesn’t expect to hear the name of his first hockey club, but when he does, he’s hit by a sudden wave of nostalgia. It was tough, in the very beginning and later, in more ways than one, but Kent is not ashamed of where he came from.

“Coach Dan still around?” he asks, and the boys nod. 

“He came here with us,” the smallest one says, bouncing up and down on his heels. “We can go look for him if you want!”

They run off before he can say anything, and when they come back after a moment, Kent’s breath almost catches. 

He’d like to say that coach Dan hasn’t changed at all, but when he sees the grey hair and the glasses that weren’t there before, and the way coach Dan’s skin looks almost translucent and paper-thin, Kent realizes it’s been more than ten years since he last saw him, and coach Dan wasn’t young even back then.

“Kent, we’re all so proud of you over at the rink,” he says, and he sounds choked up as he hugs Kent. He seems smaller, too, like he’d shrunk with age, or maybe it’s just Kent who grew up. “You’ve done so much, and you worked so hard for this. Congratulations, son, you really deserved that win.”

Kent nods, and there’s tightness in his throat and his chest that makes it hard to breathe. Hard to talk. 

“Thank you,” he manages in a strangled voice, and he has to clear his throat a few times, blink back the tears before they fall. “It’s so good to see you again. Been a few years, huh, Coach?”

Before coach Dan has a chance to respond, Kent’s phone rings. When he fishes it out of his pocket, it turns out it’s a private number, but Kent knows he should take it anyway, because it could be anyone—from a shitty telemarketer trying to sell him crappy insurance policy to one of his sponsors’ representatives. 

“Sorry, could be important,” he says, excusing himself, then goes to find a quiet place before he picks up. He ends up in a secluded area behind a neat row of white cedars, shaded from the sun by the tall hedge.

“Hello?” he says, pressing his phone between his shoulder and his cheek as he crouches to re-lace one of his shoes.

For a moment, there’s nothing, then, “Hello, Junior.”

Kent freezes in place, his heart beating rapidly in his throat. 

“What the fuck do _you_ want?” he asks, slowly sinking to the ground to lean against the cold brick. This can’t be fucking happening.

“It’s your big day today, isn’t it?” his father says, and Kent knows this tone. Knows not to trust it. “I just wanted to congratulate you, I read about it on the internet, saw the pictures. You look good.”

Kent clenches his fist around a handful of gravel. The stones are round and smooth, and they spill between Kent’s fingers when he finally unclenches his palm.

“Well, you could see for yourself if you hadn’t fucking ditched us and fucked off god knows where back when we were kids, couldn’t you, now,” he spits out, venom on the tip of his tongue. He’s shaking all over. “So what is this all about, really? Just wanted to make fucking small-talk? _Congratulate_ me on my Cup win that you didn’t even bother to come watch in person?”

His father is silent for a moment, then says, “Heard you signed a pretty big contract, too.”

Kent laughs. It’s loud and bitter, and he thinks he’s going to throw up. 

“So that’s what this is all about, right?” he says, runs a hand up and down his face, then drags his fingers through his hair. “Oh my fucking god, I can’t believe it. I can’t _believe_ you would do this to me today, of all days. You know what?” He’s not even screaming, but there’s cold fury dripping past his lips with every word he speaks. “ _Fuck you_. Don’t fucking call me again, and don’t you _dare_ contact mom, or I’m gonna get a restraining order. And you know what else? Go to hell.”

He hangs up and stuffs his phone in the back pocket of his jeans, trying to get his shaking hands under control, presses his lips together and his body against the wall. He wants to punch something. He wants to throw up. 

His head is pounding, and his heart is trying to shatter his ribs, beat its way out of his chest. He can’t go back out looking like this, so he finds the back entrance to the building and waits inside until everyone is occupied with lunch. He’s starving, but he’s also afraid that if he ate something right now, it wouldn’t stay down for very long. He feels sick, his palms clammy and his forehead sweaty. He wipes it with the back of his hand.

They party slowly winds down to a close by the time his mom finds him, almost an hour later, pacing the length of the hallway back and forth. 

“Honey, are you okay?” she asks, and Kent looks up, squares his shoulders and nods. “You missed lunch.”

Kent swallows. “I wasn’t hungry,” he lies. 

“Baby, you’re a hockey player,” his mom says, cupping his cheek, and he can’t look away. “You’re always hungry. What happened?”

Kent takes her hand between his and squeezes. “Nothing happened, mom. I’m fine. I just…I think I need to do something.”

.

He’s in the car as soon as the last of the fans leave the venue, the Cup secured in the backseat with a seatbelt, the Hockey Hall of Fame guy—Mark—in shotgun. Kent has finally stopped shaking somewhere between the conversation with his mom and now, thank fuck, and his head is clear—as much as it can be, considering—the last of the champagne buzz long forgotten. 

It’s been a shitshow of a day, an emotional roller coaster of epic fucking proportions, but there’s one thing that Kent _needs_ to do before he hands the Cup back to its keeper. 

It’s silent in the car, and Kent hasn’t had the chance to try out the sound system in the new Audi he bought with his signing bonus yet, but he’s fine with nothing filling the silence, save for the low hum on the engine and the rustling of their clothes. 

“Where are we going?” the guy asks somewhere around North Chatham, and he keeps glancing at Kent like he’s afraid Kent has finally _lost it_.

Kent changes lanes to pass a slow, old Volvo. 

“Massachusetts.”

“What the fuck is in Massachusetts?” the guy asks after a moment of stunned silence, as he looks at Kent sideways from the passenger’s seat.

Kent swallows and accelerates, speeding down the I-90 in the direction of Boston.

“Jack Zimmermann,” he answers, looking straight ahead.

.

The place is a dump.

When Kent first parks in front of the hockey team house on the frat row, he thinks he has the wrong address. The building looks like it’s about to collapse, painted dirty green, the paint peeling off in large chunks above the windows. The steps are mostly old, raw wood, except in the corners, where it’s still possible to see they’d been painted white at some point in the past ten years or so. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, Jack,” Kent says to himself under his breath, shaking his head. What the fuck was Jack even thinking, he has no business living in this place. It’s a goddamn _frat house_ , for god’s sake. A shitty one.

He gets the Cup out of the car, because he’s _not_ leaving it just lying there—he’s not a fucking idiot—and crosses the narrow lane to reach the front yard, Mark trailing behind him, looking around like he can’t believe what he’s witnessing. Kent can see this entire thing is blowing his mind.

When he walks up the steps, it turns out that the front door is ajar, so Kent knocks, then pushes it open and steps inside, the Cup under his arm. In the dim hallway, there are two bulky guys carrying boxes who turn around when he enters. One of them—taller, muscular, with a buzzcut—almost drops his box to the floor, then nudges the other guy—shorter, broad-shouldered, wearing glasses—in the side, his eyes never leaving Kent.

“Cohen, are you fucking seeing this?” Buzzcut says, and Glasses makes a face that no human being should probably be capable of making but which conveys his total surprise pretty fucking well.

“Gentlemen,” Kent says, nodding to them by way of greeting.

“ _Brah_.” Glasses puts his box away. “ _Brah_. Go, tell Shits. He’s gonna fucking lose it.”

There’s a long, awkward moment when Buzzcut books it up the stairs, leaving Glasses alone with Kent and Mark, who does a very good job of blending in with the surroundings, as unobtrusive as they come. 

“Dave Cohen,” Glasses says, and he extends his hand in a greeting. Kent shakes it and smiles. 

“Kent Parson.”

Cohen looks at Kent like he’s stupid. “ _Duh_. Bro, _I know_. Congrats on the whole—” he gestures vaguely at the Cup, and Kent feels a bit like a tool for bringing it here, like he wants to brag in front some pretty inconsequential NCAA team. But it’s not about them; no, it’s about _Jack_. It’s about the fact that they were supposed to do this together, and then they didn’t, and now Kent is making this right, as much as he can. 

“Thanks, I appreciate it a lot,” Kent says, because that’s just good PR, and he wants to look as gracious as he can, considering he dragged the fucking Stanley Cup into some shitty frat house at a goddamn _college_.

He can hear two people coming down the stairs now, and he ducks into the living room area to leave the Cup on the table, because it’s getting pretty heavy, and he looks like a douche just standing there, holding it. 

It’s not Jack. Instead, Buzzcut is coming down, accompanied by a guy with the sickest flow and even more impressive mustache. He looks—and smells—like a stoner, must’ve been interrupted mid-bowl, judging by the slightly unfocused, mellow look in his eyes that Kent has learned to recognize well. 

“ _Brah_ ,” Mustache says, staring back at Buzzcut, and Kent is pretty sure this has been the most bro-y exchange he’s been part of in recent memory, and he plays for a fucking hockey team. “Hey, I’m Shitty,” Mustache adds, and Kent stares at him for a few seconds, blank, until he realizes Mustache wasn’t making some weird confession while totally baked; that’s just his nickname. “Shitty Knight.”

Kent’s eyebrows go up. “Any relation to—” he asks before he can stop himself, because if yes, then he could probably chirp Knighter about it for months to come. 

“Dude, _I wish_ ,” stoner guy laughs like it’s the greatest joke ever. “But I’m guessing you didn’t drive here all the way from fucking _Albany_ or wherever to talk about my illustrious family relations or lack thereof, so I’mma go find—”

“ _Parse_.”

When Kent turns around, Jack is standing in the front door, hand curled around the doorknob. He looks like he’s just seen a ghost. 

Kent forces a smile, even though he feels faintly sick. “Hey, Zimms. Happy birthday.”

Jack’s jaw sets in that way Kent feels entirely too familiar with, like he’s about to drop his gloves, and for a moment he thinks Jack is just going to fucking _deck_ him right then and there. Then Jack takes two steps forward, loosening the death grip he has on the doorknob, and when he looks to the right and sees the Cup, he _freezes_. 

Kent hears a commotion behind him, and when he turns around for a split second, Mustache is ushering the two other guys outside through the back door. Kent breathes and steels himself, then looks back to Jack, who’s standing completely still in the middle of a dim hallway in a shitty frat house, looking so soft around the edges that Kent tries not to think about the _why_ too much.

“What the hell do you want, Kent?” Jack asks when the silence between them takes a turn from awkward to fucking unbearable, and this time he moves forward, like he wants to crowd Kent against the wall, then halts mid-step, like he’s just remembered where he is and with whom. Like he doesn’t even want to touch Kent. It fucking _hurts_.

“What do you think I want?” Kent asks, and there’s more bitterness in his tone than he intended. “I wanted to see you. To talk to you. We haven’t done that in a while, you may have noticed.”

Jack takes another look at the Cup, then grabs Kent by the arm and almost drags him up the stairs, then down the hallway and into what Kent assumes is Jack’s room. It’s freakishly tidy, the way Jack hadn’t been before, and when Kent looks around, sure enough, there’s still that fucking _Be Better_ poster hanging on the wall. Kent wants to tear it down and burn it in front of Jack. He fucking wants to _scream_.

Once they’re behind closed door, Jack turns to Kent, and his face is a mask, expressionless in a way that scares Kent to the core. He used to be able to read Jack pretty well (not well enough), but now there’s just _nothing_ , and Kent is left scrambling, caught completely off-guard.

“I’m not doing this, Parse,” Jack says, and he may _look_ like he doesn’t feel anything, but he sounds _pissed_. “What the fuck do you even want us to talk about? Want me to admit how much _better_ you are? You have the silverware to prove it now, don’t you? Irrefutable proof. You don’t need to hear it from me.”

Kent recoils like he’s just been slapped.

“Or maybe we could talk about the fact that you fucked off to some fancy college instead of signing as a free agent and doing what you were always fucking meant to do. What we were _both_ always meant to do,” he says, taking a step towards Jack. He wants to punch him. He wants to kiss him. “Or about the fact that you haven’t talked to me in three years. How about it, Zimms? You wanna talk about _that_?”

Jack laughs, and it’s so cold Kent wishes he would just take a swing at him instead. 

“And you thought that, what?” Jack asks, his voice low but cutting, and his eyes never leave Kent’s face. You can say a lot of things about Jack Zimmermann, but he’s never been a coward. “You were gonna show up here with the fucking Cup, to rub it in my face, on my fucking _birthday_ , because I don’t know how much of a fuck-up I am, right? It’s not like I’m reminded of that every day or anything, no, you had to personally make sure that I knew just how much of a worthless disappointment I’ve been to everyone.”

Kent is left speechless for a moment, and he feels like he’s just been punched in the solar plexus; he can’t get enough air, feels like his head is swimming, his vision blurring for a second that seems like it lasts for hours. 

“What the fuck are you even _on_ ,” Kent says in return, and it’s bitter and cutting, and then he realizes his mistake a moment too late, the slip of the tongue that wasn’t supposed to _mean_ anything, but now Jack is pale as a sheet, and Kent feels like he wants to cry. “I didn’t mean— _Look_ , what the fuck do you want me to say? This is not some fucked-up revenge scheme, I didn’t fucking come here to _gloat_ , and I sure as hell didn’t come to rub it in your face. I fucking miss you, okay? I miss you.”

His voice breaks at the end, and Kent hates that, hates himself, hates _Jack_ , for a split second.

“I fucking miss you,” he says in a quiet voice. “I just wanted— We were supposed to do this together, to celebrate _together_ , and then you just _gave up_. You went to fucking _college_ , and if this is it, if this is the only chance either of us will get to— I won it _for you_. I wanted it to be you, next to me on the ice, but you just _stopped_ , you _gave up_ on that life, and I just— I _miss_ you.”

Kent has never seen Jack’s eyes look so cold. 

“What the fuck are you even talking about, Kent?” he spits out. “So you thought, what? That you’re gonna _bring me the Cup_ , like some fucking consolation prize?”

Kent’s stomach drops, and his chest hurts on his left side, and he tries to breathe through it as he reminds himself he’s not dying; it’s not a heart attack, just a panic attack.

“So you think that’s what it is?” he asks, incredulous. “You think this is supposed to be a _consolation prize_?”

Jack stands his ground, stares Kent down. “What the fuck _is_ that supposed to be, then? What the fuck do you _really_ want?”

Kent is pretty sure he’s hyperventilating right now, and he doesn’t remember the last time he felt like this. Back when he found Jack that night, maybe.

“I want you to fucking acknowledge that it’s not only you who suffered!” he shouts, hands clenched into fists at his side. He’s shaking all over. “You fucking left me alone with this, and I get it, I get that it was horrible for you, and I’m fucking _sorry_ I couldn’t do anything to help you back then, and I’m sorry that you got so fucked up, but guess what, I got fucked up, too.” 

There are tears in Kent’s eyes, and he hates that, he hates showing his weakness in front of Jack, like he’s afraid Jack is going to find the soft part of Kent and twist the knife.

“I was fucking eighteen, Jack,” he says. “ _Barely_. And I found you, and I didn’t even know if you were alive when I had to get up on that stage and fucking _smile_ for the cameras, like I even gave a shit about the goddamn draft. I still don’t know if it was my fault. But I’m probably never gonna find out, am I.”

He can see as Jack swallows, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, but then Jack isn’t saying anything, and Kent needs to leave, he needs to not be here, he needs to not look at Jack. 

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He was supposed to come here to share with Jack what they always wanted to have, what Kent won when Jack couldn’t, so that Jack could have this moment, at least, if nothing else.

They say: be careful what you wish for. 

Well, Kent got his fucking wish.

He barrels past Jack and out of the room before Jack can react, goes down the hallway almost blind, and there are dark spots in front of his eyes; he tries to shake them, but his head is spinning and his mouth feels like cotton. 

He’s almost at the top of the stairs when Mustache slams the door next to Jack’s room shut and catches Kent by the arm; for a brief moment, Kent wonders how much he’s heard, and how much of that he’s willing to repeat to other people.

“Parson, dude,” Mustache says, and Kent looks over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “You okay, brother?”

Kent breathes, once, twice, three times, swallows around the lump in his throat. His heart is pounding in his chest. 

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice doesn’t even shake. “Yeah, I’m good, thanks. Gotta go, though. It was nice to meet you.”

He runs down the stairs, taking two steps at a time.

“Let’s go,” he says to Mark and grabs the Cup from the table. “We’re done here.”

They cross the road to get to Kent’s car, and it takes him three tries to actually put the key in the ignition. Instead of starting the car, though, he sits in silence for a few minutes, completely motionless.

He knows now that he shouldn’t have come here in the first place. He knows that he shouldn’t have come here with the _Cup_ —it was a stupid fucking move, and he should’ve known better, really, but he was too fixated on the idea of Jack—who abandoned hockey for a college degree, who abandoned _Kent_ for a totally different life that Kent knows he could never be a part of—never getting to touch the Cup, never getting to share this experience with Kent. It was supposed to be an olive branch, a way for them to reconnect after three years of not talking, not seeing each other in person even once. 

He didn’t know he would be meeting a stranger wearing his friend’s face.

He can’t believe he’s still holding it together. He fishes his phone out of his pocket, nodding absentmindedly to Mark, who asks if Kent is okay.

_i’m sorry_ , he texts, his hands shaking, _i’m sorry, i know i fucked up, i didnt think, i’m sorry…_

His phone stays silent. 

Kent drives back with a single-minded focus that translates into his skills on the ice, because he’s afraid of what would happen if he stopped to think about what just transpired even for a moment. In the passenger’s seat, Mark is completely quiet, looking out the window at the changing scenery. It’s slowly starting to get dark. 

They’re already past the state line when Kent hears his phone chime with an incoming message as soon as they stop at a red light. There are seven cars ahead of them, so he pulls the phone out of his pocket and unlocks the screen. 

It’s from Jack.

_it wasn’t_ , the message reads, and another one comes almost immediately: _it wasn’t your fault_.

The light changes, and Kent puts the car into drive, trying not to lose it completely. If he were alone, he’d just pull over and cry until he physically couldn’t anymore. As it is, he grits his teeth and drives.

.

They say it stays with you forever, the first time you hand over the soft parts of yourself to someone else, put them in their hands and trust them not to close their palms into fists. 

No one ever says it hurts anyway.

But after he comes home that day, exhausted and full of tears that he never got to spill, Kent tries—tries to get rid of the memory of Jack, of the memory of Jack’s touch, lodged like a ghost between Kent’s ribs and breathing alongside with him, sustained by the naïve hope that maybe Kent was wrong, that maybe there is a way for them to get back everything they lost, if not their innocence, but he also knows this—no matter what he does, there’s a part of him that will always belong to Jack. 

And, in the end, this is the thing that hurts the most.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://idrilka.tumblr.com/) if you want. :)


End file.
